Between Foreigners and Shi'is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority.

• Author: Sanasarian, Eliz
• Position: Book review

Between Foreigners and Shi'is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority. By DANIEL TSADIK. Palo Alto: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007. Pp. xxiii + 295. $60.

Ii is clear from the start that Tsadik breaks new ground with this detailed, objective, well-researched, and comprehensive study of the Iranian Jewish minority in the 1880s. He undertakes archival work from a variety of sources to address a vast array of issues. These include the contradictory accounts of the size of the Jewish population in Iran, the urban geographical setting and internal migration to Tehran, and Jewish relations with the Muslim majority both in the local context and vis-a-vis the state.

Due to Islam's impurity laws, Muslims prohibited Jews (and other non-Muslims) from opening shops in the city bazaars, pushing them thus toward other professions. The author describes the use of impurity laws in some localities as a pretext for curtailing economic domination since they also swept up European traders in their wake. Jews worked as tailors, money-lenders, glass polishers, money-changers, engravers, producers of salt and ammoniac, fortune-tellers, midwives, and prostitutes. Some worked in the fields and some owned small businesses. Like other non-Muslims they practiced professions that were shunned by Muslims, such as those of silversmith and wine-maker. A few members of the Jewish elite look on occupations that Muslims admired, such as being physicians to kings. Economically, Jews and other religious minorities were involved more than Muslims in international trade, especially with Russia.

The book is divided into five chapters that trace developments in Jewish life in Iran from 1848 to 1896. It begins with a brief summary of the general structure of the Sunni approach to non-Muslims, following with a discussion of the role of the Imami Shi'i legal opinion with regard to impurity of infidels, food consumption, marriage, inheritance, and punishment, all of which reflect the supremacy felt by Imami Shi'ism over non-Twelver Muslims. Although the focus of the book is on nineteenth-century Iran, much of this doctrine became the law of the land with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and many legal practices are still in effect in the twenty-first century. For instance, the inheritance law allows a convert to Islam to inherit all that belongs to the non-Muslims in the family, but a non-Muslim cannot inherit from a Muslim.

The author provides a detailed...